Like Tevye leaning over to Golde in Fiddler on the Roof and asking if she loves him, I ask myself if I am a teacher. “Am I what?” I ask. With my sons nearly off to college and the trouble in the world, I’m upset. I’m worn out. I should lie down. Why ask? For forty years, I’ve corrected notation, passed along wisdom, led performers through discovery, encouraged experimentation, asked what I’ve thought were the right questions. But am I an educator? After forty years, hundreds of masterclasses, lessons, courses, and coachings, why ask? Because a hound must howl, and howl I do.
Cross-legged in a circle with my Bard College undergraduate composition students in October 1988, wrapped in sweaters, drinking coffee sheltered by the leaves at their zenith against an aquamarine sky, making musical instruments out of objects we’ve collected in the surrounding woods. Three don’t read music; one senior has already spent three years studying with Joan Tower and wants to write an orchestra piece; one is a gifted cellist studying with Luis Garcia Renart; one is a singer-songwriter, the son of a famous folk musician; one is a visual arts major thinking about changing majors. “What are we going to play first?” asks one. “We’re going to arrange the first 25 bars of Stravinsky’s Dans Sacral from the Rite of Spring for us to play together.” “When do we get to compose something?” asks another. “We create solo pieces for ourselves first, then perform them for each other; then we each write something for the entire ensemble.” “Do we write them down?” “Yes, this time, but maybe not the next time. I’ll show you how,” I answer, taking a pull on my coffee and feeling really, really good. Their serious faces intent on their busy hands, as they create their instruments. And me talking to them about the basics — melody, harmony, rhythm, counterpoint, narrative — as we work the way that Mother and I used to when she washed and I dried, looking out the window at the trees resuming green.
From 1988-90 I conducted the NYU-Washington Square Chorus. It wasn’t really a teaching job, but it remains the first entry on my CV. From 1988-1997 I taught at Bard College, ending my days there as an Associate Professor, having taught the entire undergraduate theory sequence, counterpoint, ear-training, orchestration, score reading, and chamber music. Leon Botstein, Bard’s polymathic president, conducted several graduating seniors’ orchestral works each year in concert with the American Symphony Chamber Orchestra, providing a powerful incentive to the more artistically ambitious students and their composition teachers to get cracking.
“As for the Princeton Atelier, I’m learning more than I’m teaching!” I jot in my journal in January 1999. “8 composers, 8 singers, 8 writers, Paul Muldoon, and me in a room equals magic: I talk about art songs; Paul talks about poetry and reads some; I talk about pop song forms and sing some; we both talk about prosody from opposite directions (very cool); Paul shares lyrics; the composers set the poets’ words; the singers sing the new songs; I coach; Paul critiques —it’s a crazy-effective format I called From Art Song to Parola Scenica and it’s the most fun I’ve had teaching since the 80s.” Sighing, I turn to the 802 invoices coming in from the copyists for the performance materials, and the printout of the news that I am going to have to hire a baritone at my own expense to sing the role of Kane in the upcoming premiere of Bandanna in Austin. “Well,” I write, “the money I get paid for teaching the Atelier will just about cover these costs. But this is what I signed up for.”
During the 1993-94 school year, and again during the 97-98 school year, I guest taught as a Visiting Professor at the City College of New York for David Del Tredici during his sabbatical years — private composition students, of course — but also orchestration and analysis. From 1996-98 I joined the Curtis faculty, giving composition lessons to “non majors” in what was described to me by Gary Graffman as a sort of holding pattern until Ned retired.
I’m thirty-one, teaching Ned Rorem’s students for him in the Barber-Menotti Room at Curtis in 1992, playing and singing through their one act operas and offering feedback. One has set (as had I a decade earlier when I sat where he is sitting) a playlet by a famous playwright friend of our teacher’s. “Did you get the rights?” I ask. “No.” So I launch into a long monologue about the importance of, and the process of, acquiring rights. Immersed in my spiel, I fail to read the room. The prosody is awkward, but the music is brittle and interesting. I make a few comments about strong syllables on weak beats and line readings and then come up for air. I am entirely unprepared for the lesson to have been a flop, but it is.
Do I like teaching? For forty years I’ve taught reflexively, like composing, like breathing. Can it be taught? I don’t know. I do know that the student must desire to learn, and that good teaching is bespoke. “I’ve never been a parent before,” I admit to my sons occasionally — usually after a particularly spectacular paternal fail. Well, I’m still learning how to be a composer myself, still trying to figure out what composing is. That’s a start. It’s been nearly thirty years since I’ve sat through a faculty meeting, despite having been delighted to have served as a guest lecturer, composer in residence, artist in residence, swashbuckler du jour, or whatever, at over a dozen educational institutions, not to mention masterclasses all over the place. Don’t get me wrong, I love doing it, and I know that I have a lot to offer. But, increasingly, I find myself feeling not as though I am singing so loudly that I cannot hear other peoples’ voices, but that the din through which I am trying to express myself is almost completely drowning me out. All that is left are the questions.
I am forty years old, doing double days during the sweltering summer of 2001 in Manhattan—jury duty during the day, composing and practicing in the evenings—when the symptoms of appendicitis present: severe pain in the lower right side of my abdomen, taut belly, and cold sweat. Like everyone without insurance, my only recourse is the emergency room. Fortunately, we wrap up jury deliberations that day, and Doctor F., the retired doctor who composes with a passion usually reserved for Byronic heroes, is scheduled for his weekly lesson. He has me stretch out on the Monk Bed. Tapping my belly like a cantaloupe, he asks, “How long?” “A few hours,” I reply. “Probably early enough to address with Cipro,” he says, shaking his head doubtfully. Handing me the prescription, he says, “We will walk to the pharmacist together. If it doesn’t clear up within six hours, go straight to the E.R. You’re taking a grave risk, Daron.” “Why now?” I ask him. He sighs. “I believe you have brought this on yourself, Daron,” he says. “People can make themselves sick. That’s what you have done.” I look at the floor. “Why do you want to die?” he asks, quietly. I look up at him sheepishly. “Change your life,” he commands, shaking his head, as together, the score of Boulez’s Répons spread before us on the table, we launch into his lesson.
From 2005-2013 I served as the festival artistic director and chair of faculty for the Seasons Fall Music Festival in Yakima, Washington. It was enjoyable, engrossing work. The festival consisted of three symphonic concerts, eight chamber concerts (guest professional ensembles such as the Finisterra Trio, Imani Winds, etc.), three student recitals, and three jazz concerts (artists like Gary Burton, Chris Brubeck, Branford Marsalis, and Marvin Stamm). I created festival thematic programming, including the integration of a film festival, and interwove through it a curriculum that paired conductors and composers for two weeks of joint masterclasses in podium technique and composition and public lectures and masterclasses by visiting scholars and artists (such as music critic Bernard Jacobsen and Seattle Opera’s David McDade), oversaw and coordinated the activities of a twelve-member faculty, performed and coached chamber music, and taught composition.
Yes, they all still make music, I think, looking at the 2009 group portrait of the composers, conductors and faculty at the Seasons Festival, and each in their own fashion: Zach finished at Juilliard and has gone on to practice law; Slavko does something beyond my understanding involving math; Dean’s all over the place on the west coast conducting; Tim’s composing a new orchestra piece and playing on Bourbon Street; Chris is following in his father Dave’s footsteps and concertizing with orchestras, composing up a storm; Don Thulean has passed; Rob has just finished his first opera; Brooke has retired as music director of the Yakima Symphony; Mike’s making documentaries and teaching guitar in New York City; Jesse is in business; the other Chris is living in Moscow and teaches English to diplomats, or used to….
Am I an educator? Of a sort. I was aware in the mid-eighties when I left Juilliard before completing the doctorate that an academic career was out of the cards. The academic world’s entirely understandable need to require of its citizens (at least semi-empirical) proof of intellectual credibility seemed less important to me back then than immersing myself in an artist’s examined life. I didn’t suppose that I couldn’t be bothered to teach, or that I viewed an academic position as a Plan B, but I knew that, as Mary Anthony Cox told me one day, “I didn’t need a doctorate to write my operas.”
“Shame,” I tell the thirty or so workshop participants and audience of about 200 at the Academy of Vocal Arts in Philadelphia on a gorgeous September afternoon in 2012 as part of the Russian Language Workshop, “is the nuclear reactor that powers the libretto of Pique Dame.” Pausing for emphasis. “Of course it appeals to this Lutheran Boy.“ A few chuckles. “Sha-a-a-m-e,” I sing, sizing the air in front of me as the audience. Rolling laughter. “’Life is a game.’ Now, what does that mean? It doesn’t mean that life is light pickings. It means that games are brutal, like death.” “Marc gave lectures for money,” I recall Virgil Thomson telling me back in the 80s when I worked for him at the Chelsea as I continue to lecture for the next hour. “You shouldn’t do it — it’s part of the ‘associated skills racket’ and too easy. You get a taste for the attention and then it’s all over.” Yet, here I am, lecturing for the fifth year at Ghenady Meierson’s invitation, and learning as much as I am teaching, for how lucky am I to have been paid to spend all those days learning and internalizing Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades — a piece I ought to know? Can it be that Ghena has engaged me to lecture on it partly because we’ve known one another from the beginning and he feels I will grow as an opera composer through familiarity with this work? Yes.
By the time I accepted in my fifties a fascinating position at the Chicago College of Performing Arts from 2017-2023 (during which I composed, mounted, and directed my first two “operafilms”) I’d already done stints at Baylor University (Artist in Residence 1998-99), as the Sigma-Chi Huffman Composer in Residence at Miami University (1999-2000), Artist in Residence at the University of Nevada Las Vegas (2000-2002), as the Franz Lehar Composer in Residence at the University of Pittsburgh (2006-2007), and as a Master Artist in Residence at the Princeton Atelier (1998, 2005) — without having completed the doctorate back in the day. I still do not know if I am a good educator; but I am, for better and worse, a teacher through and through. As Ghenady quipped to me over dinner at the Art Alliance following one of the lectures for his program, “for someone who isn’t an educator, you sure do teach a lot.”
“But I’ve never called cues before,” my composition student says, headset on, already learning on the job, perched between the professional lighting designer and production manager at the worktable in the cavernous old Studebaker Theater in Chicago’s Loop sometime in September 2018 as I direct the staging and filming of my operafilm Orson Rehearsed around her. “You’re doing a great job,” I say because she has risen to the challenge and is doing a great job. They all are — all the Chicago College of the Performing Arts performers, all of my composition students, working side by side with my New Mercury Collective team — learning by doing, empowered, faces intent. “Here are the tools,” I say to each in turn, “make something.” I look at the stage, still happily washing dishes and looking out the window and teaching the basics — dramaturgy, using Cubase, taking and giving production notes, balancing a live orchestra with pre-recorded sound, theatrical and operatic protocol and tradition — as the house lights dim and together, we reenact the parable of the Cave.
Ned Rorem, over tea one afternoon when my sons were little and commissions were a little slack and I was considering going back to school to complete the doctorate, laughed when I told him that I regretted not having one: “What, after all these years? Here,” he said, reaching for a scrap of paper and a pen, “I’ll write you a note.” I suppose that publishing my artistic and literary memoir Duet with the Past: a Composer’s Memoir in 2019 – at the age of 58! — was the sort of thing that mid-century American composers like Ned once considered a “doctoral-equivalent” document. That I didn’t stop there but have gone on to write the peer-reviewed monograph Exploring Operafilm: Creating the Bardo Trilogy and am polishing the manuscript to the next, Duet with the Future: an Artist’s Essays limns, when taken together, the personal transit not of a composer, or an academic, but, simply, that of an artist.
The sound floating through the late summer 2023 evening Virginia air seems comprised of — in equal parts — Dublin pub, abattoir, campus protest, primal scream session, twelve actors simultaneously auditioning for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof by shouting “Stella!” and a Hell bent for leather revival meeting. Wintergreen Music Festival artistic director Erin Freeman is leading all of us as we sing — six composers, six conductors, a couple of stagehands, and the faculty (that’s Gilda and me) — through the instrumental parts of the chamber version of Stravinsky’s Pulcinella Suite. For the students who’ve never sung, or played in an orchestra, it’s a revelation; for the rest of us, well … we feel like teenagers again. Nothing bad can come of this empathy building and group bonding experience — everyone is well-aware of how we sound and we’re all loving it, leaning into the dogs howling at the moon nature of it. Afterwards, when Gilda (who finished her doctorate and, with grace and mindfulness, enjoys a flourishing career both as a composer / performer and as a tenured professional academic — something I have not accomplished) and I walk our hound Peanut up the mountain toward our lodgings, she cocks one ear at us as and looks over her shoulder in that Rita Hayworth hair-flip way she has as though to say now you two are finally on to something.
A hound must howl, and howl I do.
